Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to airborne optical sensors and more particularly to domes used to cover airborne optical sensors.
Brief Description of Related Art
Faceted domes are preferred over single piece domes, such as hemispherical domes or hyper hemispherical domes for use as apertures and for housing airborne optical sensors, such as infrared countermeasure systems in order to keep costs down. Basically, faceted domes are a lower cost solution over the single piece domes. Such domes invariably require protection from direct lightning strikes and from electromagnetic interference (EMI). Such domes may be used to improve performance relative to the RE102 test which is a U.S. Department of Defense Military Standard for magnetic field testing and relative to RE103 which is the U.S. Department of Defense Military Standard for Antenna and Harmonic Outputs.
Existing methods apply a layer of conductive material over the faceted domes to protect any housed electronic circuits from lighting strikes and EMI. However, this may result in significantly reducing optical transmittal properties.